Manfred Follow Up: An Interview with Jeffrey Cox and Michael Gamer

Freshly returned from their participation on the “Manfred, Performance, and Theatre” alongside Omar Miranda and Johnathan Gross, Cox and Gamer granted K-SAA an exclusive interview of their experience at the conference.

How did seeing the staged reading of Manfred enrich your understanding and enjoyment of the written text? Did it bring to life any elements of the written text that you were not expecting?

Any reading, even a silent reading, is a performance of a text, and the stage reading reminds us of that, makes us self-conscious about that. Hearing the words always brings to the fore the sound, the physicality of the language, which this performance certainly did. Having different bodies, different voices speak the lines enriches this experience as does even the simple blocking used in this production. Even the limited movement of bodies on stage reminds us of the materiality of this play which is often read as almost entirely internalized.

Many of the key moments of Manfred are set in extreme locations such as the Alps, a cataract, the summit of a mountain etc., all of which are central to the atmosphere and meanings of the play. How did the staged reading overcome the challenges of scale that Byron creates in Manfred? Do you think the performance reproduced a sense of scope and the sublime?

We really appreciated the ways in which the performers made the words soar which is one way to reproduce a sense of the sublime; but, as we are interested in the ways in which actual physical enactments created meaning in the period, we would really love to see a full production of the play that tried to take on its grand settings, its stage tricks, its spectacle. We do not want to have to accept the division between performed theater and some sort of mental theater. This production of Manfred did justice to the language but not to other ambitions of Byron’s drama. In many ways, this issue was the primary motivation of our paper, which sought to remind our audience that Byron was intimate with the conventions of melodrama and that Manfred consumes those conventions conspicuously, especially in its opening act.We love that Red Bull has been doing staged readings of romantic plays; we’re hoping in the future, though, that they move to plays that actually were staged in the period rather than sticking to closet dramas. By all accounts this was an age mad for the theater, whose playwrights — Byron included — experimented daringly with form. Manfred is not a closet drama but an experimental drama calling for a different theater, and most of what we identify with modern theater — its hybrid genres, its fondness for music and song, its lighting practices, its star systems, spectacular sets, etc. — came into being during the romantic period.

From the staged reading of Manfred, held in the Loreto Theatre, NYC

Given your understanding of the intimacy of connection between romantic theatre and the gothic, did you feel like the staged reading of Manfred brought to life some of the concerns regarding the romantic/gothic divide to a modern day audience? Did you experience some of the fear and terror that Byron creates in the written text?

We really don’t see a divide between romantic and gothic writing, especially as neither “romantic” nor “gothic” were terms used in the period as we use them today. If such a divide does exist, it arises primarily out of the efforts of commentators to make distinctions between high and low culture. We see this process in contemporary reviews and in the more than two centuries of critical writing about the period that we now have. Put another way, writers we now call “romantic” looked to any number of aesthetic conventions as they composed. As such, they had recourse to supernatural subject matter, sublime landscapes, violence and the threat of violence, and portraits of addiction, obsession, compulsion: all ideas we also find in so-called “gothic” writers.

Certain scenes and lines from the written text were cut for the purposes of the staged reading. If you were directing Manfred, what elements of Byron’s play would you bring to the fore? What would you cut from the play entirely? And why?

While it is understandable that the political lines on Napoleon were cut, they of course ground the play in its moment, its world. We would bring them back. We wouldn’t cut anything, in fact. It’s just not that long.

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